I have a Seagate 320Gb external hard drive formatted as ext3 hooked up to my NSLU2 NAS.

Recently the NAS has been reporting low disk space on the drive, but now it's refusing access to the drive. None of the valid user accounts can access any files. They can browse the directories but if you try to even open a file you get permission denied.

I'm thinking that the issue could be to do with the low disk space and the way that the NSLU2 works, so I thought I'd just hook up the drive to another computer and try to delete some files and repair the permissions issue.

I decided to use my Raspberry Pi for this as it's conveniently situated next to the NSLU2, so I plugged the external drive into it and as I expected, I can see the files, but can't access or delete them because they were created on another system.

So I tried "chown" on one of the folders on the drive, but I got permission denied, so then I tried "chattr -i" on it and got the same.

Is there an easy way to take ownership of these files so that I can sort them out, or is the problem likely to be due to some sort of corruption on the drive? if so, is it repairable?

Thanks,

Richard

smallpond

11-11-2012 06:20 PM

"permission denied" most likely means the drive is mounted read-only. What does mount say? Any error messages for the drive?